Share Public Information On The U.S. Open of Snowboarding, Get Sued!

Alright so by now you heard the rumor that Vail is going to be the new host mountain for the U.S. Open of Snowboarding. Well it’s a slam dunk as confirmed, especially after the interesting morning of waking up to a DMCA and threats of being sued over using a photo that can be found on a public forum. Like the old saying goes, ‘You can’t beat a dead dog’, so why are they all upset about this? Oh I know, it might not happen now that the photo has been leaked and instead we will get the Burton U.S. Open of Snowboarding at Ober Gaitlinburg instead!

Since some people who I won’t name at this time can’t comprehend how much they fucked up on the Internet this photo has been changed but to grasp the idea of it I recommend looking at this story on TWBiz especially the photo on the right. Which was hanging in a public place and anyone could see. Not to mention I still have no official proof this person ever took said photo just a bunch of copy and pasted poorly written emails and some that border line on threats against my physical person. Also for those speculating that it is Burton or Vail it is not.

But what is more hilarious is how the legalities have gone down and I think I need to share this with the world as it just defies normal logic.

Now it should be noted that I posted the said photo in question at 9 P.M. on the Angry Snowboarder fan page. After posting it a message was received 3 hours later.

Enter photographic evidence 4a and 4b:

Note evidence 4a. is a broken message and it’s not even directly known what they are talking about till message 4b. shows up. But what can be taken from this is that person 1 invited person 2 to a function who took the said photo in question that is causing this post. Also because of said photo the lawyers will now forget to dot their I’s and say fuck no to crossing T’s and the contest will be lost! Oh the humanity! These messages were sent sometime about 3 hours after photo was posted.

Shortly after that message which caused me to laugh, I opted to not care about doing work on the site the rest of the night. But the story continued even without my presence.

Enter photographic evidence 5a.

This was sent after those first two messages and it’s evident that this is the said friend of person 1 who took said photo. Now there’s that DMCA thing again, which hey fine you may or may not have shot that photo at this point I don’t know there was no copyright, no watermark, and I definitely didn’t hack your electronic device.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works.

OK fine hopefully you read up on what you can and can’t do on Facebook here, here and of course here.

Here’s a photo of 5b.

This was sent an hour after the first message and places it’s time near 1 A.M. I was promptly not even paying attention to my social media at this point at all. Also as a normal person I was getting ready for bed.

Enter photographic evidence 6.

Anyone notice anything here? Besides it being 1:05 in the morning, I have 4 hours to take it down? Now as person 2 is from Colorado and I have never hid the fact that I live here they should have:
1. Been able to deduce that I live here.
2. Assume I wouldn’t be answering emails at this hour as it’s late.
3. 4 hours from that email would be 5:05 A.M. and no sane person would be up to accommodate them.
4. This guy has a lawyer at his beckoning at five in the morning.

Being a normal person that sleeps during the night and the severe lack of snow to motivate me to venture out of my man cave, I tend to not bother waking up till that bright round thing in the sky is well overhead. Since for some reason society decides they want to contact me at random hours I actually woke up fairly early to discover the joys of being threatened to be sued yet again. Seems to be an ever present motif with this site, anyone out there want some pro bono work? Much to my dismay and heart ache I saw that it was far past those measly four hours I was given and just accepted defeat that my ass would be in a sling and the photo has stayed up. Oh but wait I looked into it and upon getting a truly legal DMCA you have 24 hours to oblige the party, that’s nice since I’m kind of lazy and sloth-like in my feeling to do this. Someone probably should have checked out the legalities before throwing shit at the wall. Also I highly doubt at 5 a.m. this guy has a lawyer on speed dial who will instantly start drafting up cease and desist letters along with getting things lined up to sue me. Then again for all I know this guy could be Richie Rich Senior and have the capability to have a legal dream team to rival O.J. Simpson!

There’s three things that can fully be deduced from this:

1. It’s pretty obvious that Vail is now home to the Open.
2. Burton can’t contain a media blackout of this magnitude.
3. People freak out about the stupidest shit, this event was going to happen regardless as to whether or not you took this photo. Also to quote a friend of mine, “if they didn’t want the media to know why the hell would they have such a huge banner for people to take photos of.”

Seriously this is just ridiculous that a photo that was on a public forum with no water mark, trade mark, copyright, or proof that said individual even shot it would cause this. As of right now sure I’ll take your photo off Facebook it’s been shared countless times and has spread like wildfire. At one point even Yobeat had posted about it, but being a good person I informed Brooke over there that she might want to take it down because some guy with amazing email writing powers and a superb understanding of the law that defies normal logic might just be angry and we don’t need any more anger in snowboarding. I cornered that market and yes it is trademarked!

@random I could be wrong or naive or whatever, but I tend not to think there is a company behind this. If Burton or Vail wanted to keep this quiet they have plenty of lawyers who can do a way better job than this. They also have PR teams who if they’re doing their jobs, would know better than to threaten Angry with lawsuits. I’ll take it at face value that somebody let the pic out and is freaking out because they’re worried about the consequences.

[…] allegedly shows a banner for the 2012 US Open Snowboard at Vail, Colorado. It was posted on the AngrySnowboarder.com site, then reposted on Yobeat.com. Now, Burton has officially released the information. First off, I […]

I tend to agree with Nasty James; this is probably when guy let his friend come to the event, said friend put up photo, other guy is worried about losing his friend’s dream job in the industry AND his friend’s friendship as a result, and got increasingly more and more manic once he realized he forgot the “you can’t get nude pics off the internet” rule.

It’s OK, there’s a ton of people out there with a tenuous grasp of the law that think anytime someone mentions a “lawsuit” that their target automatically gets scared and complies with whatever asinine demands they want to make. What these people don’t understand is you actually have to have been illegally wronged to win your lawsuit, otherwise you’ll likely end up paying the other guy’s court costs or much, much worse if they get pissed enough at your ignorance. I hate when people try to use petty threats of legal action as some sword of damocles, as if it adds onto their power. It doesn’t, it just makes them look like imbeciles.

The part I find ridiculous is the secrecy about this. I understand the concept of information control, but really, did this need to be hidden and compartmentalized so badly? Why can’t they just say “look, this will piss some groups off, won’t piss off others, and will be neutral to most. It sucks a bit conceptually because of the history of the event, but is a good move, so we’re doing it?”

If people weren’t out there thinking they were Sun-Tzu and James Bond all the time, and were more open about their operations and reasons for doing things, they’d be a lot better off, if nothing else they could spend less time on secret-and-lie tracking and more time on their business. Knowing what is a secret and what isn’t is a critical business skill :).

[…] Burton managed to top the list again of memorable things when they announced they were moving the U.S. Open to Vail. People were not amused with the appearance of one slightly blurry phone photo of the event and law suits were threatened. You can read about that here. […]

[…] the 31st Burton U.S. Open. Now after 31 years of being in Vermont this was evidently a big deal as someone once threatened to sue my ass into oblivion for posting a photo a little early. Needless to say it was awesome of […]

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